Introduction

The huge and rapidly increasing amount of structured and unstructured data available on the Web makes it both possible and necessary to support users in finding relevant information. The trend moves more and more towards smart knowledge services that are able to find information, aggregate them, draw inferences, and present succinct answers without requiring the user to wade through a large number of documents. The novel avenues made possible by knowledge services are numerous and diverse, including ubiquitous information access (from smartphones, tablets, smart watches, etc.), barrier-free access to data (especially for the blind and disabled) and knowledge discovery.

Over the last years, several challenges and calls for research projects have pointed out the dire need for pushing natural language interfaces. In this context, the importance of Semantic Web data as a premier knowledge source is rapidly increasing. But we are still far from having accurate natural language interfaces that allow handling complex information needs in a user-centric and highly performant manner. The development of such interfaces requires the collaboration of a range of different fields, including natural language processing, information extraction, knowledge base construction and population, reasoning, and question answering.

The main goal of this workshop is to join forces in the collaborative development of open frameworks for knowledge extraction and question answering, to share standards, and to foster the creation of an ecosystem of tools and benchmarks. The workshop will therefore not only comprise short and long paper presentations but also a hands-on session on already existing frameworks, standards, and benchmarking campaigns, as well as a social meet-up.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Paper Submissions

OKBQA 2016 solicits the submission of original research papers in two types:

Full paper submissions (up to 8 pages, plus two extra pages for references) must describe substantial and original work.

Short paper submissions (up to 4 pages, plus two extra pages for references) must describe an original work which may present a small, focused contribution, a work in progress, or an interesting application case.

Before submitting your paper please ensure you have read the Instructions for Authors and that your paper uses the prescribed style files.
To submit your work, please use the submission page at the following address https://www.softconf.com/coling2016/OKBQA2016/.

Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop.
At least one author of each paper is expected to register for the workshop and attend to present the paper.

Topics

Specific topics include but are not limited to:

Question Answering over Linked Data

Benchmarking Natural Language Interfaces

Term Matching and Entity Disambiguation

SPARQL Query Pattern Generation

Schema-agnostic Query Generation

Discovery of Linked Data Sources

Endpoint Profiling

Dealing with Data and Schema Heterogeneity

Providing Justifications of Answers and Conveying Trust

Knowledge Base Design for Question Answering

Language Resources and NLP Software for Question Answering

Reasoning for Question Answering

Natural Language Querying of RDF exposed as Linked Data

Natural Language Querying of Web Services

User Feedback and Interaction

Dialogue Systems

Entity-centered Knowledge Bases

Event-centered Knowledge Bases

Human Intervention of Knowledge with QA

NLP Annotations for Knowledge Extraction and Machine Reading

Gold Standard Data Sets and Quality Assessment

Indexing and Mappings from Existing Sources (Structured, Semi-structured or Unstructured)